Videoconferencing is now a widely used business communication tool, and the technology for the encoding and transmission of audio and video over telephone and computer networks is well advanced. Less well developed are the various types of user interfaces that can employed to present the images of the various participants in a videoconference. In particular, the user interfaces of existing so-called “desktop” videoconferencing applications do not provide a user with a realistic sense of physical place during a videoconference.
Conventional desktop videoconferencing applications provide a relatively static user interface in which individual windows are displayed for each other participant's real time video stream. FIG. 1 illustrates a typical prior art user interface for a multiway videoconferencing application. As can be readily seen, each participant's video stream is displayed in an individual window 101. The windows 101 themselves are displayed as entirely “flat” without any perspective projection relative to the user (e.g. an orthographic presentation of the window). Its important to note that whatever perspective is in the video (as a result of the remote participant's camera) does not itself provide or create a perspective effect of the window 101 in the user interface. At best, each window 101 can be positioned in on the screen at some (x,y) location, and can be resized for its width and height. The windows are displayed without any rotation or “tilt” the windows with respect to a Z-axis (normal to the screen) so as to impart a sense of perspective to the windows. As a result, users of these conventional videoconferencing applications do not achieve a sense of being in a conversation with other participants, since the physical cues of perspective that exist in a real face-to-face conversation are not present.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a videoconferencing application and user interface thereof that provides user with the physical cues of perspective.